Every year, eVolo Magazine holds their Skyscraper Competition, which prompts designers from around the globe to redefine the aesthetics and function of your run-of-the-mill tall building.

Of the 714 designs submitted for this year's competition, eVolo selected three winners and twenty-two runners-up. Among those picked were giant Himalayan water towers, mountain arcologies, and a vertical landfill in the middle of Manhattan. Here's but a sampling of the many freaky designs that took home eVolo's top honors:

Housed within 55,000 glaciers in the Himalaya Mountains sits 40 percent of the world's fresh water [...] The "Himalaya Water Tower" is a skyscraper located high in the mountain range that serves to store water and helps regulate its dispersal to the land below as the mountains' natural supplies dry up. The skyscraper, which can be replicated en masse, will collect water in the rainy season, purify it, freeze it into ice and store it for future use. The water distribution schedule will evolve with the needs of residents below; while it can be used to help in times of current drought, it's also meant to store plentiful water for future generations.

The Monument of Civilization proposal suggests locating trash vertically in a tower and using the energy generated from its decomposition to help power the surrounding city. By locating the tower in the heart of the city, energy is provided in immediate proximity, and money is also saved in transportation costs when garbage no longer needs to be shipped out of town.

Damian and Rafał Przybyła's wheeled Migrant Skyscraper, which rolls over the detritus of a collapsed civilization:

The building-inside-a-wheel can stay stationary for however long residents please, but, for example, if political upheaval destabilizes a region, residents can fire up the biofuel-powered engine and cruise to a new location.

The design for this city is set in a wild landscape inside a mountain to preserve the development of nature around it. A geothermic plant is the logical solution to provide energy to the city. The main condition for this is that the city should be located in a geographic zone with high geothermal gradients – active tectonic and volcanic areas.

Nikita Asadov's House of Babel, which seeks to emulate the Old Testament folly to physically reach heaven:

The House of Babel offers a radical revision for the common method of building a traditional home. With the help of aerostatic construction we can eliminate extra floors and elevate the building to almost any desired height. The post-crisis skyscraper is the house consisting of two floors connected with a high-speed elevator on a thin heavy-duty cable.

You can see all twenty-five (frequently entertaining) designs — like the existential Polish skyscraper that is designed never to be finished and the undersea fortress in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — at eVolo's website.